The Improbable Rise of NPR Music

By

Steve Oney

Updated March 14, 2013 8:43 p.m. ET

Washington

How did public-radio broadcaster NPR become a power in the music world? Steve Oney takes a look and a listen.

The cluttered corner of an office on the fifth floor of NPR headquarters hardly suggests a coveted music venue, but the band Lucius is thrilled to be here. On a winter afternoon, the up-and-coming five-member group, led by singers Holly Laessig and Jess Wolfe, performs a spirited four-song set for about 30 network employees who drift in following a PA announcement. The crowd, however, is just for show. What counts is the audience outside the building. Brooklyn-based Lucius, whose buoyant sound calls to mind the girl groups of the '60s, is playing a "Tiny Desk Concert," and NPR Music will stream it online and make it available as a podcast. "For a young band trying to get people to hear us," Ms. Laessig says, "this is amazing." Other Tiny Desk guests have included Adele and Wilco.

NPR Music Performers

NPR's Bob Boilen Eli Meir Kaplan for The Wall Street Journal

With 2.7 million unique monthly visitors, 1.4 million podcast downloads every four weeks and an additional 1.4 million iPhone and iPad apps in circulation, NPR Music (npr.org/music) has become a sought-after stop for both aspiring and established artists. More broadly, it has become a rising power in the music industry. "NPR is an extremely important part of our overall plan," says Lisa Sonkin, a vice president of promotion at Sony Music.SNE-2.64% Last year the label launched Passion Pit's "Gossamer" by streaming the album exclusively on the site, thereby assuring that it would attract the sort of loyal, affluent and geographically diverse audience associated with public radio. Peter Standish, a senior vice president of marketing at Warner Bros. Records, whose artists include Neil Young and Eric Clapton, says, "You can reach a lot of people on NPR Music that you can't reach elsewhere."

For all of that, there's no getting around the fact that NPR remains best known for its radio news broadcasts, which are often characterized by sonorous interviews with heads of state and winsome features about pumpkin-growing contests. Some decision makers in the music business believe the network's music site hasn't fallen far enough from the tree. This ain't no disco, or CBGB. This is still NPR: safely highbrow, never snarky and, in its quest for inclusiveness, sometimes labored. Like NPR, whose listeners have long been stereotyped as Volvo-driving, tweedy elitists, the site comes across to some industry executives as indifferent to the broader audience.

Mark Satlof, senior vice president of Shore Fire Media, which represents Bruce Springsteen and Elvis Costello, concedes that NPR Music doesn't showcase many top-40 artists. But, he says, that is not its mission. "If you're a sentient consumer, you'll already know about those acts. The purpose of NPR Music is to curate music and champion their taste."

The "Tiny Desk Concert" series—which has also featured Rufus Wainwright, Lyle Lovett, Robert Cray, the Soweto Gospel Choir and more than 250 other artists—is only one of NPR Music's attractions. At least once a week, "First Listen" streams a forthcoming album in its entirety (among the most memorable of 2012 was Miguel's "Kaleidoscope Dreams"). Then there is "Live in Concert." In January, it carried the grand opening of the SF Jazz Center in San Francisco. Every Tuesday, "All Songs Considered," the creation of network stalwarts Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton, debuts a playlist of six to eight of its hosts' favorite tunes. Add the showcases (Tori Amos at Le Poisson Rouge Club in New York last fall and countless acts at the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas, going on now), together with links to music programming produced by public radio stations around the country and the blog postings of a staff curious about everything from alt Latino to avant-garde noise, and you have a serious contender for the ears and eyeballs of music lovers on the Web.

The competition for online audience has recently grown intense. According to Triton Digital, which tracks Web traffic, Pandora, which streams a full spectrum of music 24 hours a day, generates the biggest numbers. (NPR.org, the network's overall website, ranks sixth, with NPR Music accounting for 15% of its audience.) Sites like Pitchfork, which appeals largely to indie-rock fans who appreciate not just music and videos but at-times-scalding reviews, are also playing the game. In addition, RollingStone.com, by drawing on its parent magazine's reporting while offering music and videos, has become an increasingly big factor, especially when it comes to introducing forthcoming albums. (The Wall Street Journal also posts exclusive streams and videos of in-house concerts online.)

NPR Music's breadth, depth and ability to break new material are its main strengths. The site offers music that appeals to rock, jazz and classical lovers—all under one roof. Still another advantage is NPR Music's ties to "All Things Considered" and "Morning Edition," which, even if Washington-centric, have music woven into their fabric and provide news for the site as well as a familiar storytelling style.

NPR Music in its present form just turned five. "It's the closest thing we have to a pure startup inside what is now a 40-plus-year-old institution," says Kinsey Wilson, NPR's executive vice president and chief content officer. "This group of now roughly 20 people has had an opportunity to invent something from scratch."

In 1999, Bob Boilen, then a director of "All Things Considered" who also played synthesizer in the D.C. band Tiny Desk Unit (namesake for NPR Music's concert series), had an idea. Among his duties on "All Things Considered" was to come up with the musical interludes used between stories that enable a host to shift seamlessly from, say, a battleground report to a profile of an eccentric sculptor. Known as "buttons" (because they hold disparate elements together), these melodic transitions have always generated thousands of inquiries from listeners wanting to know the names of the artists who recorded them and where they could purchase the music. In response, Mr. Boilen started "All Songs Considered," which at first was dedicated solely to highlighting the acts behind the buttons.

By 2005, "All Songs Considered" had added Mr. Hilton and widened its interests from the buttons to any tune that caught the fancies of its co-hosts. Shortly thereafter, NPR Music hired Anya Grundmann as its executive producer to run the site. She had previously worked at "Performance Today," a concert program produced by NPR competitor American Public Media. "At the time there was all this wonderful music presentation happening across the public radio system," she says. "It was embedded in every nook and cranny. So the concept was: What if we take this wealth of music content and bring it together?"

Initially, NPR executives were worried that such a wide-ranging effort would not work on the Web. "I was skeptical that you could create a multigenre site," says Mr. Wilson, whose job is to ride herd over what goes out on the air and via the Web at the network. But he says NPR's audience tends to be more wide-ranging than that of other music sites. "Even if they gravitate to a particular genre, they are curious about some of the others," he says.

In 2008, Sony proposed streaming all of Bob Dylan's new album, "Tell Tale Signs," on NPR Music, and the website took off. "For years we'd been battling just to get the rights to play one song off new records," says Mr. Boilen. "Now they wanted to give us everything. But we didn't say yes right away. We wanted to hear the album. If it sucked, we weren't going to do it. But it was great." Thus was born "First Listen," a series that caused a shift in the way record labels do business. The companies had been holding almost everything back, but as the online culture emerged, that no longer worked, and they opened their cupboards, betting that listeners, once enticed, would buy.

Since the inaugural "First Listen," a nod from the series has become such a plum that NPR Music keeps record-label submissions in a secret computer file, accessible only to employees who have the password. Called "The Watermark Drive," because its contents are stamped with watermarks to protect them from piracy, the file is spoken of at NPR as if it were a sacred vessel.

"We want to create the feeling you used to get in record stores when somebody would hand you something and say, 'You have to hear this,' " says Amy Schriefer, who supervises "First Listen" and the live events. "That's why some of our picks sometimes seem a little off the wall or under the radar." Despite its virtues, such eclecticism has a downside, providing an opening for rivals. "RollingStone.com has been making a move lately," says Warner Bros.' Mr. Standish. "They're more mainstream, in a good way."

To date, NPR Music has performed beyond expectations. NPR doesn't break out its financial results, but it says NPR Music, which has an annual budget of $3 million, is close to breaking even. Part of the reason is that its audience tends to be younger than public radio's general audience. Its median age is 34, and only 29 for those connecting via social media, compared with 53 for "Morning Edition" and 52 for "All Things Considered." Thus it appeals to sponsors, or underwriters, as they're known in public radio. Among them are Lexus, Ketel One vodka and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. Moreover, NPR Music attracts grant money. "The underwriters like our mass audience," says Mr. Wilson, "and the foundations like our support of forms of music that don't find wide commercial interest." And NPR itself welcomes the opportunity to bring younger listeners into the radio fold.

This year, NPR Music will introduce personal music streams created by DJs currently working throughout the public radio system. Known for the moment as simply "the streaming project," it will offer local stars like Tom Schnabel of KCRW in Los Angeles the chance to present their online playlists for a national audience. "It's an effort to corral the music discovery that's happening on the station level," says Roger LaMay, general manager of Philadelphia's WXPN, which produces "World Café," a music show already distributed by NPR. "The stations have a real sense of place," he adds.

Meanwhile, NPR Music will push further into video productions. Already, the site periodically offers "Field Recordings," stylish videos of such bands as the Civil Wars, who performed last fall at an outdoor setting in the Pacific Northwest. Ms. Grundmann, NPR Music's executive producer, says the streaming project and "Field Recordings" capitalize on the unique powers of the Web. Radio and the Web are so different, she notes, that in the future, the biggest challenge will be to remain "true to who we are as we move from one medium to another."

Bertis Downs, the longtime manager of R.E.M. and a music entertainment lawyer, says: "To me, a mention on NPR Music is more valuable than any magazine cover. A magazine cover is just one shot, but on NPR Music you're linked to the whole world. If I had a choice between a hard copy and a link, I'd take the link."

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